Making History: Visionary pastor builds bridges throughout community

JOHN IWASAK, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By JOHN IWASAKI, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, February 4, 2007

Harvey Drake is senior pastor at Emerald City Bible Fellowship, a multicultural church in Rainier Valley that started as a mostly black congregation in the early 1990s.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Harvey Drake is senior pastor at Emerald City Bible Fellowship, a...

Senior Pastor Harvey Drake asks Jerrell Davis, a 14-year-old member of the Emerald City Bible Fellowship, to demonstrate his basketball skills Sunday by shooting some balled-up paper into a trash can in front of the congregation to make a point about faith.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Harvey Drake Jr. should be a bleak statistic, a depressing tale of a young black man mired in bad circumstances and worse decisions.

His mother, a heroin addict, died when she was 39. His father was an alcoholic. Two of his sisters were hooked on heroin.

"I used to do heroin, do opium, do acid, do mescaline," Drake said without flinching, recalling his teenage years in a tough San Francisco neighborhood. "All the pills you could think of, in combination with alcohol."

Had those toxic cocktails continued, few would have noticed his troubled life, presuming he was still alive. Today, 32 years after that drug-filled era, the Seattle man keeps a low profile, but for a dramatically different reason.

Instead of wasting his life, Drake has devoted it to quietly serving others.

In 1987, Drake created a non-profit organization that now helps 600 families in Rainier Valley with educational, family, health and economic-development programs. He later founded a multicultural church that encourages members to put their faith into action.

He trains young African Americans to become leaders and mentors and to give back to their communities. He brings black and white pastors together to forge personal relationships and improve racial understanding.

"We want to communicate the gospel of Christ, and we also want to demonstrate the love of Christ," said Drake, 52, sitting in the Rainier Avenue South offices of Urban Impact, a partnership that evolved from his original organization, Emerald City Outreach Ministries.

"Doing good works and sharing the good news," he said. "(We put) those two together with the hope that we can really help people find genuine, authentic wholeness."

Those who know Drake call him an unsung hero in Seattle's black community and beyond, a visionary who makes a difference without seeking acclaim.

"He's willing to walk alongside white churches and organizations to help them learn how to undo institutional racism. And he does that with great grace. A lot of people talk about partnerships, but Harvey does it," said Delia Nüesch-Olver, associate professor of global and urban ministry at Seattle Pacific University, where Drake is a trustee.

Over the years, Drake has traveled with groups in the U.S. and abroad to gain better understanding of racial and other issues. He spent time in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots in 1992, visited post-apartheid South Africa and helped build water systems in El Salvador.

More recently, Drake started meeting with several Korean American pastors to improve racial relationships between their race and African Americans.

Not that you would necessarily know about that from him. Doug Wheeler, former director of Zion Preparatory Academy, said Drake is as humble today as when he met him in the early 1990s.

"You'll never hear him blow his horn," said Wheeler, who invariably learns what Drake has accomplished from those who work with his friend, not from Drake himself.

Drake, a bear of a man with wire-rimmed glasses and a gray-flecked goatee, doesn't forget where he came from.

In the early 1970s, the period he was deeply into drugs, he ran into a childhood friend whose grandfather was a pastor. They told him that "committing my life to Christ could result in radical transformation," Drake said. "I thought, 'Yeah, right.' "

On the other hand, figuring his disintegrating life "couldn't be any worse," he decided to put his trust in Jesus.

"Much to my surprise, I began to see how God viewed me," Drake said. "I started loving me. Drugs was not a way to demonstrate self-love; it was more like self-hate."

Drake said he kicked his habit without entering into any treatment program.

He has worked full time in Christian ministry since 1979, first for Youth for Christ in Oakland, then, after moving to Seattle in 1984, for Young Life.

But it was volunteering in the chaplaincy program at the King County Juvenile Detention Center in the mid-1980s that spurred the creation of Emerald City Outreach Ministries. He saw too many young black males growing up without fathers and dropping out of high school.

High school seemed too late to reach those youths, so Drake initially focused on helping middle and elementary school students with a tutoring, leadership and discipleship program. That expanded to after-school programs, teen leadership training, and parenting, family and marriage workshops.

Ken Kierstead was on the ministry's ground floor, serving on the board and then as executive director.

"Without being arrogant and presumptive, Harvey had what he believed was a vision from God" for the ministry, said Kierstead, now senior director of urban global missions at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle. "We believed that if we were faithful to that vision, God would be faithful.

"Sometimes we wondered how God would (come through financially). But Harvey never wavered. Never wavered. I've learned so much from him about trusting God."

Drake hired teens as interns to run a six-week summer academy for the younger students, paying them a stipend and offering them a $1,000 scholarship for college. Over the years, the ministry has given $152,000 to 97 high school students.

Drake taught that it was "not whether, but what you could do" to make a difference in the community, said former summer intern Veeda Holmes, an office manager for World Vision, a Christian relief and development organization.

In 2005, Emerald City Outreach Ministries became Urban Impact after merging with Northwest Urban Ministries, an outreach of Rainier Avenue Church.

Urban Impact operates on an annual budget of $807,000, with revenue from individual and church contributions and from grants. On March 3, the ministry will open an expanded fitness center, with plans for office and retail space and affordable housing on its 3-acre site.

Besides serving as president of Urban Impact, Drake is senior pastor of Emerald City Bible Fellowship, which started as a predominantly African American congregation in the early 1990s but now has equal numbers of blacks and whites, with a sprinkling of other races.

Former summer intern Aisha Cathcart, who attends Drake's church, said her pastor's ideals are not mere words.

"In the (church) leadership team, every ethnic group is represented, to show that we can work together," said Cathcart, a family-support worker at John Muir Elementary School.

By the early 1990s, Drake starting meeting with five other urban African American pastors in Seattle, including Wheeler, to talk about how they could better work together and with urban and suburban white pastors.

Out of that group grew the Coalition for Community Development and Renewal, a multiracial organization of more than 50 pastors in the greater Seattle area that regularly meets for fellowship, training and prayer.

"I feel called to be a bridge builder," Drake said. "I'm confident of who I am and where I'm going. But I've got to have a humility about me. What gets us in trouble is the arrogance in all of us."